1. The Field of the Invention
The invention is in the field of petroleum reservoir asset management, more particularly in the field of identifying field development opportunities for petroleum production.
2. The Relevant Technology
Petroleum is a critical fuel source and is the life blood of modern society. There is tremendous economic opportunity in finding and extracting petroleum. Due to a variety of technical and geological obstacles, it is typically impossible to recover all of the petroleum contained in a reservoir. With advancing technologies and increasing economic incentive due to higher crude oil prices, the average petroleum reservoir recovery rate can now approach about 35%. While this represents a significant increase in average total petroleum recovery in recent years, it also means that about 65% of the petroleum found in a typical reservoir remains unrecoverable from an economic and/or technical standpoint.
With regard to productivity, operators typically analyze each individual well to determine the rate of petroleum extraction, or well productivity. However, operators typically do not understand how to evaluate and understand aggregate well activity and productivity for an entire reservoir or oil field, or how to evaluate well activity and productivity across a plurality of reservoirs or oil fields.
Given the high cost of exploration, dwindling opportunities to find new petroleum reservoirs, and the rising cost of petroleum as a commodity, there currently exists a tremendous economic opportunity for organizations to significantly increase both short-term and long-term production across their petroleum reservoirs. Nonetheless, a majority of petroleum in a typical reservoir remains unrecoverable in spite of the high marginal economic benefits of increasing recovery means because there does not currently exist technologically and/or economically predictable ways of increasing recovery.
While the technology may, in fact, exist to increase current production and/or increase total long-term recovery of an organization's petroleum reservoirs, an impediment to implementing an intelligent long-term plan for maximizing current output, extending the life of each reservoir, and increasing total recovery across reservoirs is inadequate knowledge of where to focus the organization's limited resources for optimal production. For example, while a particular reservoir may underperform relative to other reservoirs, which might lead some to neglect further development of the reservoir, the reservoir may, in fact, contain much larger quantities of recoverable petroleum but be under-producing simply due to poor management. Furthermore, organizations may waste resources developing some reservoirs, in which the production gains achieved are disproportionately small compared to the developmental resources expended. The inability to properly diagnose on which reservoirs to focus further development and resources, and to implement an intelligent recovery plan can result in diminished short-term productivity and long-term recovery across the organization's petroleum reservoirs.
In general, those who operate petroleum production facilities typically formulate a recovery strategy for a field and/or reservoir prior to petroleum extraction. For example, an operator can determine how to drill, the number of wells to drill, well placement, what production techniques to use (e.g., material injection), etc. Once the initial recovery strategy is implemented, operators tend to focus on oil well maintenance, including implementing the latest technologies for maximizing well output at the reservoir. Operators often fail, however, to reassess a recovery strategy based on changed circumstances over time, such as, for example, considering the total picture of health and longevity of a field, and how the field performs relative to other fields, both on a short-term and on a long-term basis. This limits an operator's ability to identify subsequent development opportunities. For example, it can be difficult to identify subsequent cost efficient actions that can be taken in active fields to increase petroleum production.